Facebook Is Launching Another New Product You Won’t Use

Deepening its investment into , Facebook has begun its roll out of a designated “Audio” tab inside its cellular app where users primarily based within the U.S. will soon have the ability to access podcasts, Live Audio Rooms, and short-form sound bites.

While “Facebook is moving into podcasts” could be a sentence for a lot of reasons, the platform has been all in on new audio formats for a while now. Facebook first launched it back in June, which allowed creators to integrate their audio content directly into their Pages for easy listening and distribution. And podcasts aren’t the only audio content that can be populating its new mobile hub: Live Audio Rooms, Facebook’s answer to Clubhouse, will even get a feature in the audio tab, as will Soundbites—the short-form audio product that Facebook has been peddling as of late in a bid to draw TikTok users to the platform.

According to , the new ‘Audio’ destination will leverage an algorithm much like those used by TikTok and Instagram, which can help users discover content from both creators they follow and new ones made discoverable by a personalized suggestion system. The hub will reportedly grow to be more personalized to each individual user’s interests and preferences over time, basing its suggestions off of which audio selections you listen to and which types content you interact with the most.

While the thought of Facebook’s potential to disseminate disinformation by means of new types of easily corruptible content is sufficient to give anybody hives, the platform assures that it’s been creating a toolkit to assist it more easily identify, detect and moderate content that runs afoul of its Community Standards.

For now, the brand new Audio tab is nestled— confusingly—inside the ‘Watch’ section of the Facebook mobile app, and will soon be accessible to all US-based users of iOS and Android devices.